1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to computer database data request systems, and more particularly to the efficient processing of database requests in an n-tier computer network environment.
2. Related Art
Many companies that utilize computer database systems face the issues of network bandwidth, transaction speed, and client and server performance. These issues are fundamentally related to the current architecture for computer networked database systems.
For example, in the existing architecture, all queries from a client are sent to a database server for execution. The client and the server typically reside on different computers on the network. Thus, each client data request requires a round trip over the network. In the request portion of the round trip, the data request is delivered from the client to the server. On this portion of the round trip, a data request may pass through several tiers or intermediate servers, for example an application server. In the response portion of the round trip, a response is delivered from the server to the client. The performance of a network round trip depends on the stability, bandwidth, and traffic density of the network as well as the load on the server. Several queries sent at once, or a single large data request can potentially slow down the performance.
This type of increased response time is currently experienced notwithstanding the availability of unused computing power on the client computer. Furthermore, as the number of clients on a network increase, the scalability of the server must similarly increase in order to handle an increased number of queries.